Flourish Innovation & Technology Culture

Tell us about a recent product your team launched. How does it drive Flourish’s mission forward?

Earlier this year, we launched Flourish Annuities, which is the latest product on the Flourish platform geared toward providing independent registered investment advisors with modern and easy-to-use technology solutions to better serve their clients’ financial needs. Flourish Annuities gives financial advisors access to a marketplace of fee-based annuities, an asset class that was previously inaccessible to most advisors due to licensing and operational hurdles. The annuities asset class can bring advisors attractive alternatives, especially for the fixed income portion of client portfolios. 

This product line represents the opportunity for tremendous growth for Flourish. The overall annuities market hit $385 billion last year, but the RIA market share is almost nothing, making it a great opportunity for Flourish to grow while also helping advisors improve portfolio construction. 

What obstacles and challenges did your team encounter — and overcome — while launching Flourish Annuities?

Managing complexity was the major challenge here. We offer multiple products from multiple insurance carriers, so every task came with a slew of variations to be implemented, managed and thoroughly tested to ensure we met our exacting standards for customer experience. 

From an engineering perspective, launching Flourish Annuities required us to make sure that an often complicated and varied annuity application process was distilled down to a very concise and straightforward end-user experience, even though the application needs changed depending on variables like client location and annuity type. This involved many iterations on design and data modeling, as we built to make sure Flourish Annuities provides a smooth and easy purchase experience for all parties involved. This posed a challenge not just for building, but for also being able to test and verify many permutations, where the fine details of the application could be subtle but vital to a smooth purchase process for clients. As an estimate, we needed to support hundreds of distinct variations of applications when you combine different annuity policy types with locations and products.

Because of the breadth of offering a product like Flourish Annuities, which works across many different states where we operate and many different products, we leveraged and expanded our automation suite of tools, allowing us to exercise and test the different flavors of Flourish Annuity applications as we added new functionalities or features during the initial build. This made sure we met the specific needs for all of the applications we offer, and it empowered the team to build the project more quickly and confidently as we looked to complete the product leading up to the launch.

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
A major part of our engineering interview process includes a hackathon-style project, where the prospective candidate collaborates on a short project for a day with the panel of interviewers from the Flourish team. This is an opportunity for all participants to try out technologies or patterns that we may have been evaluating or even things that the team has read about in industry chatter, blogs or publications. Past examples include technology like WebSockets or command-line-interface packages that can inform internal tooling. The team has even tried out not-currently-used browser features or frontend frameworks or newer React versions or related client-side UI libraries (examples might include AGGrid or Tailwind). Spinning up new and interesting ideas in this context helps us gain insight on evolving technology in a lower-stakes environment, while giving the candidate a chance to experience our collaborative working style and culture.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
Flourish engineering strives to instill a sense of ownership in the engineer’s code and technology. We often use a mantra that can be summarized as “the designs and business specifications will never tell the whole story of what should be implemented in code” as a reminder that the engineers can and should think about how best to shepherd their technology into the future. 

This strategic thinking is an important and necessary part of how we foster and develop new ideas over time while meeting the needs to keep the business moving forward. We’ve seen this in several areas; we have a quality assurance automation team that has built full-featured infrastructure and tooling to help us both run and analyze automated tests and test data over time. We’ve also seen systems that we built in prior years evolve as our user base and our product needs have scaled to incorporate more patterns like relationship-based access control using technologies like SpiceDB. These are driven by engineers understanding the context of what is prevalent in the industry and having the agency to work to improve the technology that they own.